Ranking In Google Local

Wanted to Share My Thought process on Ranking in Google Local.

As far as I can tell the only thing Google does to verify that you have locations in a town is send you one postcard and you take the number off the postcard and verify your account.

So what stops you from making a connection with someone who lives in a town you want to rank in and use their residential address? I would throw someone 100$ just to tell me when they get the postcard and then read off the verification code.

Any issues with this that you guys see?

I don't see why this would not work, but if you needed to have it re-verified down the road it could be a bitch. There was a detailed thread somewhere around here talking about this sort of thing.

Usually you can phone verify for a re verify, unless you do a full location change then they require you to do post cards. Yes it does work to have multiple locations for a google local for a single business and website, but each location will need an independent phone line. Recently Google hide many local results for addresses that were not in business area's unless the user had marked "this business does not serve customers at this address" and instead picked an area they service, this helped hide a bunch of listings that were at homes.

I can say using a friends address does work, but there are ways to force Google to create a local listing for you and then you just claim it with phone verification. This takes about 2-3 weeks and now that they are caught up with postcards they have been coming in about 4-5 days for people I have set things up for.

sorry dichotomy I cannot PM you back as I do not have 15 posts yet, but the method I am talking about I am in the process of trying it out to see if it still works, I will get back to with an update and if the method works I can explain it to you. But it may take 2-3 weeks for it to work. Hopefully by then I have 15 posts provided the silly trigger system doesn't keep blocking them for no reason....